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Friday, July 04, 2008

Henry Winkler... covered in bees

I have an apartment! So as promised, I'm returning to blogging, though other things are still in limbo, so this isn't quite a full return yet.

Last week we saw part of Little Nicky on TV. It may not be Adam Sandler's best movie, but it's certainly his most underrated; few people have heard of it. (Though maybe I'm biased because this was the movie that led to my 15 minutes of fame. Sorry, Jewish Week, but the Village Voice is way cooler.) It's also the movie that contains the best Hebrew subtitle ever. The line "Popeye's chicken is the shiznit" is rendered as "Popeye's chicken yoteir tov mi-schnitzel" ("Popeye's chicken is better than schnitzel").

This was my first time seeing Little Nicky since moving to New York 6 years ago, so I caught a lot of things that I missed the first time around. For example, the subway train that hits Nicky multiple times (in his travels between Earth and hell) is the K express. Now I understand that there is no K train. (The other letters not currently used in the subway system are H, I (for obvious reasons), O, P, T, U, X, and Y.)

So let's use the comment thread to think of analogous examples of nonexistent (but real-sounding) geographic features in New York or other real cities appearing in movies (or books, TV, etc.). The Royal Tenenbaums (another movie that I first saw in Israel -- the theater audience giggled at every mention of the bird named Mordechai -- and should really see again now that I'll get the New York references) is a gold mine, including the 375th Street Y (based on the 92nd Street Y; the highest numbered street in the Manhattan street grid is 263rd, and that's in the Bronx) and the Irving Island Ferry (based on the Staten Island Ferry; there is a real Irving Island, but it's off the coast of Antarctica).

8 comments:

Although this is not related to this current thread, I just wanted to point out the polls showing the lead your hero Obama having over McCain has pretty much evaporated, IN SPITE of the fact that "O" has a big lead in fund raising, a generally friendly, supportive media hyping the "history-making" aspects of his nomination, an extremely unpopular President and serious economic conditions. I pointed out in your earlier thread that I don't believe Obama has any chance to win, too many people just don't like or trust him.

Although this is not related to this current thread, I just wanted to point out the polls showing the lead your hero Obama having over McCain has pretty much evaporated

By all means, please point them out. FiveThirtyEight.com is currently showing Obama with a 66.5% win percentage (and a projected 308.9 electoral votes), whereas the more Republican-friendly electionprojection.com is projecting Obama with 338 electoral votes, so I have no idea which polls you're referring to.

I was referring to a Gallup Poll that was referred to in the media here in Israel that was done shortly before July 4. It showed Obama leading McCain 48% to 46%.

My question regarding the electoral vote count you mentioned is regarding what the pollsters do with the "undecided" vote.

I am not happy with the decision Obama made to visit Israel. Israel has unfortunately become one of the key panderings of all candidates. All candidates, of course, claim they "love" Israel, but as Shmuel Rosner in Ha'aretz has pointed out, that has come to be a meaningless expression. People who hate Israel but express a preference that the Jews not be thrown into the sea (e.g. Walt and Mearsheimer or Jimmy Carter) are defining themselves as "Israel lovers".

Y. Ben-David, pollster.com has your poll at 47% to 43%, not 48-46. But if we get to pick just one poll, I'll pick the Times/Bloomberg poll that's 49-37, or the Newsweek poll that's 51-36, each from the latter half of June.

But I'd prefer to work from the averages on sites like fivethirtyeight and pollster, each of which show a fairly consistent 4-to-6 point lead for Obama over the past month or more based on their aggregations of polling data from much more than one organization. A consistent lead of more than most polls' margin of error is a far cry from having no chance to win.